In 2008, Founder, Douglas Carnine, was a hospice volunteer with Jeremy, a 35-year-old man dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Jeremy had experienced a three-year intensive Yogi meditation and radiated the power of mindful kindness so palpably that people came just to sit with him. That inspired Doug to devote his post-academic life to spreading mindful kindness.

 

First, he sought to test the idea of mindful kindness through correspondence with a man serving life without parole in an Arkansas prison’s maximum security unit for murdering his parents. “It was an experiment to see if people guilty of heinous crimes could not only transform themselves but also other inmates and even corrections officers through kindness,” Doug says. The experiment was later joined by three other inmates and Doug came to realize that these inmates had become teachers as they cultivated kindness out of lives that had experienced and wrought unimaginable cruelty. Doug also saw that the respect he extended to them helped destroy their belief that they were unlovable, worthless, and despised by society. 

 

Those are the roots of the Choose Kindness Foundation (CKF).  

 

Doug then took a small inheritance and invested it in a highly speculative local start-up company that ended up making a few million dollars. Every penny of those earnings has gone into funding CKF along with money from some forest and farmland he and his wife donated to the foundation.

 

The Choose Kindness Foundation launched in February 2021.